


discarnate

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [65]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Established Relationship, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Episode: s15e08 Our Father Who Aren't in Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27665003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: When Adam dreams, it’s of an anvil hanging over his head.
Relationships: Michael/Adam Milligan
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [65]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 68
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	discarnate

**Author's Note:**

> 065/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #39 – belong.

When Adam dreams, it’s of an anvil hanging over his head. 

It always starts the same, this dream. Him sitting on the ground, the hard concrete of it gritty beneath his fingertips. His eyes gaze out into the dark, unblinking as he searches for shapes that never form. There’s a stiffness in his legs, a twinge of pain in the small of his back. He could do with a stretch and yet he doesn’t move. Somehow he knows that if he got up and started walking, it would lead to nothing. Nowhere. He wouldn’t find a wall no matter how long he walked or how far his legs could take him, no matter what direction he chose. So he stays right where he is, uncomfortable and still.

It’s humid in the dark, a pulsing, sweltering heat. His throat is dry and his body covered in sweat already, and his dreaming mind wonders how long already has been, what already means. The word doesn’t feel right, any more than his body does. It feels too short. Too insignificant. He feels like he’s been there for longer. Forever. But he can’t put how long forever has been into numbers. Not hours, not days, not years. Time is immaterial. Meaningless. He can’t remember when it ever wasn’t.

And then, every time, his head jerks up like he’s heard a noise and there the anvil is above him. The bright white light of a spotlight is on it where it hangs suspended in air on a piece of black thread. It spins in a slow circle like a dancer in a music box held upside down above his head waiting for her song to end. 

The anvil spins and spins and spins and spins and Adam can’t look away. Not when he stares at how thin the thread is and the trepidation builds in him on every turn of it. Not when his jaw clenches and his neck aches from the strain of wanting to, of wanting to get up and run into the darkness, that vast nothingness that surrounds him. He can’t bring himself to move, to so much as flinch, even when the thread snaps and the anvil spirals down towards him as fast as a sinking stone. He feels the rush of air as it closes in on him and swears he can feel the press of hot, burning metal on the tip of his nose before he wakes up with a start barely a second before the anvil would have crashed into his skull.

Adam sits up gasping for breath. His back hits the headboard hard enough to hurt, his nails digging into soft sheets and softer mattress beneath him. The air has a chill to it – the way he always likes to keep it now, he remembers. He can only just hear the rain pattering against the window over the too fast thumping of his heartbeat in his ears and he remembers that it never rained in hell, too. 

He holds on to the knowledge like it’s the only thing in his head that matters, rubs it like a lucky coin or a rabbit’s foot. It never rained in hell. It’s raining here. And two and two always add up to four, don’t they?

The lamp is turned on where it sits on the bedside table, this as much of a purposeful choice as the thermostat being turned down to fifty degrees and the apartment being in a city where it rains no less than five days a week. It’s still dark out according to the lack of sunlight outside the window, an early morning darkness according to the alarm clock’s glowing red digits beneath the lamp, but the light is enough to see by. To see every wall, the door, the ceiling. To form a picture of a space that’s contained, that has its own ends and doesn’t go on forever.

It’s also enough to see his mirror image sitting at the foot of the bed, his own face watching him almost impassively back. Almost except for the concern that’s there, an extra weight in the look leveled at him, a tense line in the jaw. Small tells, but ones Adam picks up easily.

More than the chill, the light, the rain – more than even the four walls, solid and tangible and real, that surround him – it’s this that makes him take a deep breath. This, that has his heartbeat slowing down. Calming. Reminding himself that it was just a dream.

He swallows down the last dredges of panic, sour like bile. He doesn’t force a smile, doesn’t reassure that he’s fine, doesn’t even have the impulse to do either. Those kinds of niceties are pointless to spend on someone who you share a body and a mind with, after all, someone who knows intimately just how much of a lie they would be if you tried. He doesn’t expect Michael to ask him what he dreamed about. He already knows from experience that asking questions you already know the answers to is pretty damn pointless, too, and Adam doesn’t have to say it out loud to know that Michael would agree with him. 

Still, when Michael tells him instead – 

“You were less stubborn when we were in hell.” 

– Adam cracks a grin in spite of himself.

“Don’t take it personally.” His voice is rougher coming from him than it was coming from Michael, his ruined sleep still present in it. “Everyone tries to put their best face forward during the honeymoon phase of a relationship.” 

Adam doesn’t need to see the barest twitch of a lip on Michael’s own famiiar face to feel the pulse of his amusement reverberating through him, warm and fizzy like soda on his tongue, but he likes seeing it all the same. Just like he likes seeing Michael’s concern instead of just feeling it in a prickle at the back of his neck. It makes everything feel more solid to have a visual reminder of Michael, to see him outside of himself and feel him inside at the same time. It’s easier to talk out loud to him when it’s not just an empty room staring him in the face, too, even if that’s what it would look like if anyone else were in it.

“I never envied any of my father’s creations for needing to sleep,” Michael tells him, holding Adam’s gaze like he’s imparting some special wisdom, trying to make sure the words sink in. “Humans, especially. You have to spend so much of your lives unconscious just to barely function and when you’re awake it’s like you spend every minute racing to get back to that state. It’s always seemed...wasteful. I thought that if offered the chance to never have to sleep again, you would all fall over yourselves to take it.”

Adam huffs out a soft laugh and lets his head fall back against the wall. “Said by a guy who’s never had a nap in his life.”

That amusement fizzles again, echoing his own. It bubbles harder with the exasperation that’s been added to it like a speck of mentos dropped in coke.

“I’m just reminding you that the option is still available. You don’t have to sleep anymore if you don’t want to. Your body won’t degrade without it. I won’t let it. We can take the time and do anything else you want instead.”

What Adam wants is to make a quip about what anything else they could do might entail, a joke and a suggestion all in one, but the amusement that isn’t his has already settled and the prickling at his neck has only grown in its place.

It has him going for earnest instead. 

“I know that, and I’m not saying I’ll never take you up on it, but for now – I like this. Wake up in the morning, go to bed at night, have three square meals in between. It’s the normal, boring human experience. You wanted to know what that was like, well, this is it.”

“And that’s what you want? Normal and boring?”

“It’s what I need,” Adam corrects him, “for a little while, at least, just until it stops feeling so weird that I can actually have it.”

Michael stares at him for a moment longer before he nods in agreement, a single jerk of the head that he follows up with a sigh.

“At least let me take care of your dreams. If you insist on sleeping every night, you should at least be able to enjoy it, and if I’m going to watch over you, I may as well do it with you in your mindscape like I used to.”

In the cage, Michael doesn’t tack on to the end of the sentence but Adam hears it all the same.

“You want to start dreaming together again?”

“I want to keep your nightmares away, the same as I did before,” Michael says. “I could do that and not join you –“

Adam interrupts him with his own words, “But if you’re going to be watching me either way, you may as well, right?”

The look Michael gives him is full of fond exasperation that Adam can feel in his chest, warm and spreading out. He lets it soothe him back down against his pillows and Michael’s eyes follow his movement. The warmth expands. It feels like sinking into a hot bath. Relaxing, comfortable. The bad dream seems distant, already on the verge of being forgotten. 

“You could have just admitted that you missed it instead of trying to talk me out of sleeping,” Adam tells him. He can hear the sleep entering his voice again, can feel it pulling him back down into it. His eyes threaten to slip closed, but Adam fights to keep them open for a little longer. “It’s not like I don’t understand. I’ve missed it, too.”

Michael smiles at him, the expression soft and just his. 

“Is that a yes, then?” 

Adam’s eyes slide shut and he sighs. 

“Yes,” he answers. “Dream us up somewhere good.”


End file.
